That's what my week has been like so far, an eight day week! Not just for me, plenty of other developers doing it around here. The news? One of the big things I've been working on the past two months is nearly done, we're talking days now. The final export (but not the final-final) is now happening, I'm going home in about ten minutes but if you've been watching the webcams you'll know it's all been video, video and video around here. He he he.... What day are we?

Oh and yes, my previous entry was a Velvet Underground reference.

This is the most important and at the same time the most interesting community call we’ve had in a long time! We’re looking for someone special and talented!

To come straight to the point we’re looking for somebody living in the London and Surrey areas. You need to be close to our Lionhead offices.

So we’re looking for someone local with machinima experience. Have you recorded quality game footage in the past, have a knowledge of  basic camera movements and an eye for detail?  Would you like come in and sit with our video team to record game footage?
If you are that person and you’d like to apply for this temp. job we’d like to hear from you!  Send your ‘machinima CV’ to webmaster@lionhead.com with the best examples of what you’ve worked, the tools and applications you’ve worked with.

I've moved the webcam. Check it out!  

UPDATE 21:08 GMT: we've gone home now... See you over the weekend.

As of today I started moving desks; the testing guys Nathan, Kiernan and Rob with a big group of new starting testers have moved out of their office for a couple of months and so I've moved in there. This will allow us (more about that later) to edit video with the sound on our speakers and not our headphones.

So how come I'm speaking in plural regarding editing and video? Well, Woody is of course still doing a brilliant job at looking after the community site and he's also in the middle of another big task regarding the website. From next week Andy should be starting, he comes from an entire different background in television, I consider him to be one of the top editors in the entire country! He'll be coming in a couple of days for the coming weeks and months. We've worked together in the past and he's been like a tutor to me, he's a very talented and skilled editor.

Dan and Tom from IT have been very helpful with building the PCs for the technical workflow and the network requirements for all the video editing. Because of this we can now capture game footage in High Definition as well and all at an incredible low price compared with the real professionals. It should do the trick! Or we'll find out in the coming weeks...

Every day for the next ten days will be spent with video now. And we can have the volume blazing on our speakers!

Finally since there are quite a few friends of mine currently travelling or visiting their family in South Africa and with the recent riots this song is quite relevant. We don't need no more trouble!

We are currently in San Francisco, 'we' being Peter, Cathy and I. We arrived this afternoon and have now been awake for around 20 hours. I can't really tell you much about it, why we're here, but you'll find out in the coming days, so don't worry.

This following program is dedicated to the city and people of San Francisco, who may not know it but they are beautiful and so is their city this is a very personal song, so if the viewer cannot understand it particularly those of you who are European residents save up all your bread and fly trans love airways to
San Francisco U.S.A., then maybe you'll understand the song, it will be worth it, if not for the sake of this song but for the sake of your own peace of mind.

In case you are not familiar with the above, listen to this.

On 21st April 1998, Jamie launched the forums on the supreme Lionhead Studios’ website. It would turn out to be a bomb that would outlast a decade...

The first iteration of the heart of the Lionhead community, the forums, was an incredibly basic version but allowed for developers and gamers to have a chat, ask questions and have them answered instantly. The floodgates that would open over the next years couldn’t have been foreseen. It would lead to some popular fan sites, forge friendships, give a plethora of people opportunities and create an online hangout for people from all different walks of life! If we’d had to pick just one of the most memorable points in the Lionhead Communities’ history it would be the relatively unknown Easter Egg in Black&White (read this page for more information).

Specific online game features are the creatures who uploaded their own webpage (with statistics and pictures) in Black&white, plus an online multiplayer mode giving opportunity to battle it out against your friends (2001). The Movies: Online saw the day of light in November 2005. All our games saw some outstanding modding by the community and who could forget the historical developer chats on IRC (with shows like Giga)?

We’ll keep talking about this more today, so stay tuned but for now have a look at this piece of history, the very first post ever on the Lionhead forums: “Discussion forum now working !!” Posted by Jamie Durrant on April 21, 1998 at 19:34:14: 

Here’s to the next decade!

Currently playing in the background is Bob Dylan live in 1966 at the Royal Albert Hall concert. Not really anything which is in the charts at the moment, but it keeps me going. Today with a recipe for a tart!

Today I've been listening to most of the interviews that we recorded last week for the next video diary, someone had thrown the black bin bags that we use to darken the room in the bin and we couldn't really be bothered to spend another couple of hours re-doing it. In total there's 56 minutes of footage, what I'm doing now is editing these down, organising bits of audio (audio editing) in such a way that it tells its own story. Taking out bits which don't fit, change the order around and clean it up. That'll take a while to do plus the music needs to be added and then all the images, b-roll, that go 'over the top' (as in over the levelled audio) have to be added. I also will need to do additional filming for shots that I'd want to have included, a lot of them with the artists and animators. Finally I need to go to London to see Andy so we can finish it and do the final online encodes. Oh and colouring and shading. As you see there's still a lot of work left to do... Tomorrow I will need to do some serious filming and the day after that and that.

Rhubarb, raspberry and frangipane tart recipe

Yesterday in Villa Belgica (the house that Woody and I share) a rhubarb, raspberry and frangipane tart was being baked! Here's your guide to tart making: Get some puff-pastry from the shop; roll it out quite thin on a wooden board (spray flower over it!). Meanwhile, peel rhubarb; put them in a slow cooking pot with dark sugar and butter. Bake on a low to medium heat until they're almost gone. Spread some pre-made crumble mix over the rolled out pastry which you've put in something that you can put in the oven (what's the word?). Spread the rhubarb filling over this, then a few raspberries. Make the frangipane (Sam style) by mixing to egg yoghs with two very spoonfuls of icing sugar and grounded almonds. Spread it out over the pie. The excess of pastry over the edges of the form, you fold over the tart. Sprinkle grounded almonds over the edges and put in a high heat oven for max 40 minutes (keep an eye on it). Enjoy (better the following day)!

There's bucketloads more happening here in the office and I could blush, like a tambourine man playing, keep on singing, but that would just bore your blessed brains to mush.